Otter.ai secured $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF) to accelerate the growth of its artificial intelligence notetaker and conversational knowledge platform, the company said in a Tuesday (Oct. 20) press release. Otter will invest the new financing in its...
A L’Oréal adviser who needed to issue a customer a discount code once clicked through about 15 screens over 10 minutes. Now the adviser types a prompt, and artificial intelligence generates the code in about 1 minute, Salesforce reported. Across 25 North American brands, that...
A policyholder calls her insurance agency to ask what she owes. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent answers, pulls the balance and logs the call in the carrier’s core system, with no employee on the line. Interactions like that have given insurance agencies and carriers back...
A test drive at Cars24 lasts about an hour. Buyers raise loan worries, point out problems with the car and ask questions the salesperson may not answer well. Much of it used to go unnoticed. The Indian used-car retailer now records those conversations and uses...
August 03, 2026
Watch more: Monday Conversation With Gradium’s Neil Zeghidour Voice AI can hear every word you said and still have no idea what you meant. Anyone who has argued with a voice assistant already knows that. The transcript may be accurate, but the experience (and the outcome) can still be maddening. That gap becomes far more […]
May 14, 2026
For years, retail’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions revolved around making search smarter. Now, Amazon and Walmart—two of the world’s biggest retailers—are placing very different bets on what comes next. The...
February 17, 2026
Voice technology has spent a decade as a high-tech novelty, a hands-free way to set timers or check the weather that consistently hit a ceiling at the point of transaction....
December 17, 2025
Watch more: What’s Next in Payments: i2c’s John Bresnahan Businesses are finally (and finely) honing their 21st-century competitive edges. The result? Advancement across the marketplace today is becoming increasingly dependent...
October 25, 2026
Payments company Block has introduced an artificial intelligence model trained solely using human conversation. Dessa, as the model is known, learned to hold real-time conversations just by listening, Block said in its announcement Friday (Oct. 23). “As far as we know, Dessa is the world’s first AI you can have a realistic live conversation with […]
October 20, 2026
Otter.ai secured $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF) to accelerate the growth of its artificial intelligence notetaker and conversational knowledge platform, the company said...
October 01, 2026
Microsoft has launched three new artificial intelligence models that can be used to power customer service agents, multilingual assistants, interactive learning experiences and live captions and voice-driven interfaces, according to...
September 15, 2026
Google has begun rolling out two new artificial intelligence models designed to power voice agents, the company said in a Tuesday (Sept. 15) blog post. Gemini 3.8 Live is built...
